Categories
BlogTalk

Excuse the RSS spam

I was quite happy to aggregate my two bookmarks feeds (google reader shared items and my local scuttle) into one widget on my blog, except that it was rightly pointed out that nobody goes to the web page, they just read the RSS.

So I looked for one of those WordPress plugins that can periodically create a post automatically from updates to a feed. WP-o-Matic looked like a good thing to use, except that (it turns out that) it converts every RSS item to a seperate post. The result: I click a link and spam my feed with 35 new posts, each a single link. Even worse, they all get automatically posted on Livejournal, and when I delete them from the blog, they don’t get deleted there – I had to go and delete them manually using the even suckier (for deleting) interface of LJ.

So, if your feed reader just got stuffed with 35 new posts from me, I apologize.

Categories
Blather

War and Fight Scene

More videos, of a less embeddable kind:

  • The disturbing and funny stop motion animated short Food Fight reenacts global conflicts using national foods, starting with pretzels slaughtering matzos and, uh, just see it. What on earth is the pile of stuff which (as I understand purely from the context) is supposed to represent the soviets? [via Rob MacDougall ]
  • This simply awesome action short is both done in Flash and set in Flash: Animator vs. Animation. [via Global Nerdy]
Categories
Comics

Alan Moore song

[ via [LinkMachineGo]

Categories
Blather

eeeporn

Speaking of the eee PC, here’s a video that takes a good long look at an actual machine. The clip bears a disturbing resemblance to a porn video, with the pretty thing being carefully unwrapped, posed, poked and probed. I suspect this borrowed skin flick aesthetic might be common throughout the gadget-porn video genre.

Anyway, I found it very instructive. The keyboard does look worryingly small (I don’t think there’s a camera angle that makes the guy’s fingers look bigger…)

Categories
Blather

Military Promotions

The IDF is trying to fight a “plague” of draft-dodging with nauseating conformist peer pressure, and Nir contrasts this with an Ukrainian army recruitment campaign, where a uniform (with a dandy striped sailor’s vest!) and an APC will get ya da bitches.

But through that clip you get to a whole series of army ads from around the world, including one for the Lebanese Army. No war machines or weapons here, as a single unarmed young man in uniform walks through European-style boulevards and is greeted with patriotic pride by passers-by. Knowing (or rather, knowing of the absence of) the Lebanese army, one can’t help wonder if that young lad is all of it. But still, one can’t help but feel envious. Instead of appealing to machismo or spineless conformism, this ad tries to touch your heart, and show you that serving your country is a noble and worthwhile thing to do. It may not be very effective in convincing me to join the Lebanese army, but it does a very effective job at making me feel very reluctant to fight such nice people as the Lebanese. And that, at least, might help that country’s national defense.